This Week's FaiV Newsletter:

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Mar 9, 2018

Mar 9, 2018

1. Crappy Financial Products: The results are no surprise, but it remains troubling to see the numbers. “Color and Credit” is a 2018 revision of a 2017 paper by Taylor Begley and Amitatosh Purnanandam. The subtitle is “Race, Regulation, and the Quality of Financial Services.” Most studies of consumer financial problems look at quantity: the lack of access to financial products. But here the focus is on quality: You can get products, but they’re lousy. Too often, they’re mis-sold, fraudulent, and accompanied by bad customer service. These problems had been hard to see, but they’ve been uncovered via the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Complaints database, a terrifically valuable, publicly accessible—and freely downloadable—database. (Side note: this makes me very nervous about the CFPB’s current commitment to maintaining the data.)

Thousands of complaints are received each week, and the authors look at 170,000 complaints from 2012-16, restricted to mortgage problems. The complaints come from 16,309 unique zipcodes – and the question is: which zipcodes have the most complaints and why? The first result is that low income and low educational attainment in a zipcode are strongly associated with low quality products. Okay, you already predicted that. On top of those effects, the share of the local population identified as being part of a minority group also predicts low quality. No surprise again, but you might not have predicted the magnitude: The minority-share impact is 2-3 times stronger then the income or education impact (even when controlling for income and education). The authors suspect that active discrimination is at work, citing court cases and mystery shopper exercises which show that black and Hispanic borrowers are pushed toward riskier loans despite having credit scores that should merit better options. So, why? Part of the problem could be that efforts to help the most disadvantaged areas are backfiring. Begley and Purnanandam give evidence that regulation to help disadvantaged communities actually reduces the quality of financial products. The culprit is the Community Reinvestment Act, and the authors argue that by focusing the regs on increasing the quantity of services delivered in certain zipcodes, the quality of those services has been compromised – and much more so in heavily-minority areas. Unintended consequences that ought to be taken seriously.

2. TrumpTown: Another great database. ProPublica is a national resource – a nonprofit newsroom. They’ve been doing a lot of data gathering and number-crunching lately. Four items today are from ProPublica. The first is the geekiest: a just-released, searchable database of 2,475 Trump administration appointees. The team spent a year making requests under the Freedom of Information Act, allowing you to now spend the afternoon getting to know the mid-tier officials who are busily deregulating the US economy. The biggest headline is that, of the 2,475 appointees, 187 had been lobbyists, 125 had worked at (conservative) think tanks, and 254 came out of the Trump campaign. Okay, that’s not too juicy. Still, the database is a resource that could have surprising value, even if it’s not yet clear how. Grad students: have a go at it. (Oh, and I’d like to think that ProPublica would have done something similar if Hilary Clinton was president.)

3. Household Finance (and Inequality): This ProPublica story is much more juicy, and much more troubling. Writing in the Washington Post, ProPublica’s Paul Kiel starts: “A ritual of spring in America is about to begin. Tens of thousands of people will soon get their tax refunds, and when they do, they will finally be able to afford the thing they’ve thought about for months, if not years: bankruptcy.” Kiel continues, “It happens every tax season. With many more people suddenly able to pay a lawyer, the number of bankruptcy filings jumps way up in March, stays high in April, then declines.” Bankruptcy is a last resort, but for many people it’s the only way to get on a better path. Even when straddled with untenable debt, it turns out to be costly to get a fresh start.

The problem will be familiar to anyone who has read financial diaries: the need for big, lumpy outlays can be a huge barrier to necessary action. Bankruptcy lawyers usually insist on being paid upfront (especially for so-called “chapter 7” bankruptcies). The problem is that if the lawyers agreed to be paid later, they fear that their fees would also be wiped away by the bankruptcy decision. So, the lawyers put themselves first. The trouble is that the money involved is sizeable: The lawyers’ costs plus court fees get close to $1500. The irony abounds. Many people tell Kiel that if they could easily come up with that kind of money, then they probably wouldn’t be in the position to go bankrupt. Bankruptcy judges see the problem and are trying to jerry-rig solutions, but nonprofits haven’t yet made this a priority. So, for over-indebted households, waiting to receive tax refunds turns out to be a key strategy.